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Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney by Tom Payne

Accounts of celebrities are usually either sneering or gushing - or both simultaneously, those attitudes being two sides of the same coin. Tom Payne's wonderfully witty and erudite study of modern fame in the light of ancient myths and rituals is markedly kinder and more balanced, and yet also more unsettling. Drawing on tales of classical heroes such as Hercules and Achilles, as well as Jewish wedding customs, stories of human sacrifice in ancient Mexico and apposite quotes from Homer and Hesiod, Payne shows that the modern ascendancy of ­Jordan and Britney does not presage the end of civilisation. Celebrity worship, it turns out, is neither new nor lamentable. It bonds us together, and "expresses something about how our civilisation works".

Yet Fame paints a far more disturbing picture. It's not that celebrity worship is dumb and trashy, but that it's so manifestly a throwback to the cruellest forms of human